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Fighting a never-ending battle for Truth, Justice, and Product Placement! Henry Cavill in one of the few moments when we get to see him as Superman instead of just a red-blue blur dodging in and out of the cgi battles and explosions in Zack Snyder’s evocative but sadly dull Man of Steel.

When in Man of Steel Superman did that thing you probably heard he does but that you know in your heart Superman would never do, there were audible outcries of dismay and anger from at least three different grown men in the theater where I was watching the movie. One of them even said flat out, “He wouldn’t!”

I groaned to myself too. But it wasn’t just because Superman would never do that. It was because the moment in which he did it---“had” to do it---was stupid in several different ways, the main one being that it depended on Superman forgetting he can fly.

A better way to put it is the moment depends on director Zack Snyder and screenwriter David S. Goyer betting that the audience won’t remember Superman can fly. They’re counting us not to think about how Superman could have gotten out of the situation without having to do what he did or how he might have avoided the situation entirely.

And that’s pretty much the problem with the whole movie. Snyder and Goyer need us not to think, just react. And to make sure we don’t they try not to give us any time to think by moving things along at a frenetic pace and then, to be sure we’re thoroughly confused and distracted, they fill our eyes and ears with movement and noise so that our minds shut down from sensory overload.

Here’s where they made their bloomer. You can move things along rapidly through hyperkinetic editing, by treating single pictures as if they are each worth ten thousand words and flashing from image to image as if your audience is made up of the visual equivalent of speed readers, by rushing through dialog that’s all in shorthand to begin with, bulling aside essential details and exposition, by jumping from fight scene to fight scene, blowing up everything in the background and much of what’s in the foreground along the way, and if nothing is really happening, if no real story is being told, your audience is still going to have plenty of time to think because you’ll have lost their attention. They’ll be looking the screen but they won’t be watching because there’s nothing worth watching.

Critics and disappointed fans have complained that Man of Steel is heartless, humorless, soulless. What it mostly is, though, is dull.

Once you’ve seen one whole neighborhood in Metropolis crumble into dust, you’ve seen every neighborhood in Metropolis crumble into dust.

That’s about five crumbling blocks away from not being a joke.

The dullness isn’t just a matter of Snyder and Goyer seeming to think that all it takes to make a good movie is a lot of motion and noise. The dullness is due to what I implied above. They don’t tell a story. And that’s because they don’t seem to have a clue as to what kind of story they want to tell. The motion and noise are symptoms of their cluelessness. They are clueless about Superman in general, but more to the point, clueless about their own Superman and what makes him tick.

Clark’s wanderings evoke Bruce Wayne’s in Batman Begins and match them in imagery, look, and tone. And there are definite thematic parallels. Both young superheroes in the making are leaving behind their old identities and searching for…well, that’s the question. Bruce flees Gotham City after a humiliating encounter with a mob boss, symbolically shedding his now former self in the form of the overcoat he gives to the homeless guy he meets on the way out of town. We know explicitly what Bruce is looking for, power: the power he needs to defeat the criminals who have taken over Gotham City, and that includes not just the ability to outfight them. He's after the ability to out-think them by being able to think likethem which will let him think two and three steps ahead of them.

We aren’t shown or told what’s driven Clark out of Smallville and onto the road to apparently nowhere and it’s not clear what he’s searching for. Whatever he's after, though, it's not power. In fact, he appears to be running away from his powers. We know from what little Snyder and Goyer have allowed him to say on the subject he doesn't like having superpowers because they make him different and because they make him afraid of himself. In acquiring both those feelings he’s had help from Jonathan Kent who’s taught him to hide his powers as if they’re something to be ashamed of to the point of its maybe better to let people die than let them know what he can do.

We can also guess he’s not happy being a superbeing from the movie’s evocation of yet another story, the Incredible Hulk’s. In the scene after Clark saves the crew of the burning oil rig we see him sneaking through somebody’s backyard wearing just his torn to shreds trousers, looking incredibly buff but also very much like Bruce Banner after he’s recovered from one of his Hulked-out rage fests, frightened and ashamed and sick at heart and as if he would give anything for this not happen to him ever again.

The parallels suggest the criticism of Batman that’s long been inherent in Superman. Bruce wants for himself what Clark is rejecting about himself. The power to take the law into his own hands or, to put it mythologically, the power of a tyrant. That’s incredible arrogance. Clark is sort of a modern Aragorn, proving himself a true hero-king by not wanting that power.

But the criticism works both ways. Bruce is accepting responsibility for taking on the gangs and rescuing Gotham City from itself. Clark is evading his responsibility. You know which responsibility. The great one that comes with…

(This would make Man of Steel the third action-adventure blockbuster this summer about an immature hero having to grow up, learn what it means to be a hero, and accept the responsibilities that come along with the job, Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness being the other two. Only Iron Man 3 gets it right.

I hear something similar goes on with Sully in Monsters University. Maybe I heard wrong.)

If I’m reading it right, it’s this thematic back and forth that could connect Man of Steel, which, don’t forget was produced by Christopher Nolan, with Nolan’s Batman trilogy and the both of them to a Justice League movie. Or could have made the connection, if Snyder and Goyer had stuck with it and developed it.

(Maybe in the sequel, although making the connection would also depend on Nolan and Christian Bale changing their minds about coming back for more.)

But they rush us through it without giving us an onscreen payoff. Suddenly, thanks to some good advice from the parish priest and his mother’s homecooking, Clark’s ready to be Superman and Snyder drags us in a hurry onto another half-baked theme---Clark’s ready to be Superman but is the world ready for Superman?---that gets lost in the noise and confusion of the final and interminable confrontation with General Zod and his squad of superhenchmen and woman before it can be developed.

Plenty of others have written about the mind-numbing ugliness and repetitiveness of the wanton destruction of Metropolis and Snyder's failure of judgment, tact, and taste in including evocations of 9/11. (I recommend our pal M.A. Peel’s post Superman: For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Anger… ) There’s not much for me to add. But I want to make one point.

Joss Whedon did the wreck the city shtik in The Avengers but he managed to continue to tell his heroes’ stories while he was at it. Steve Rogers learns the world still needed Captain America. We learn Bruce Banner’s secret. Thor resigns himself to his brother Loki’s true nature. And Tony Stark does the up until now unthinkable for him---he acts unselfishly.

I don’t know if Snyder thought he was just going Whedon one better, but the lesson he should have taken away from The Avengers---besides the one that says character and story trump special effects---is Maybe I should try something different.

And if he didn’t learn that from The Avengers, then he should have learned it from another movie he evoked.

In Superman II, Christopher Reeve’s Superman confronts Zod and his gang in an epic battle that threatens to destroy Metropolis and saves the day by acting with heart and intelligence.

Why Snyder thought he could get away with reminding us of that while learning nothing from it beats the heck out of me.

Amy Adams is one of my favorite movie stars now working but she's all wrong for Lois Lane. She's an elf. And as an elf she has basically three modes. Good elf (Enchanted, Julie & Julia, The Muppet Movie), evil elf (The Master), and conflicted elf (The Fighter, Trouble With the Curve). No Lois Lane worth her salt or her Clark is elfin.

The script doesn't give her an elf to play, either, and Adams doesn't seem to know what to about that except to work on creating a fourth mode that I think she intends to be spunky elf---a mistake to begin with. Lois is not spunky either.---but it comes off as self-important, pain in the neck elf.

Really, though, as for just about everyone else in the cast, the script doesn't give her much of any sort of a character to play and most of what it gives her to do could just as well have been done by Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang, Pete Ross, or, for as much as it matters, by Snapper Carr, Krypto, or Beppo the Supermonkey.

For the record, out of that list only Lana and Pete appear in the movie and Lana's there as just a reference point. What the movie does with Pete is a travesty.

Michael Shannon is awesome as General Zod, although he's another who hasn't been given enough to establish and develop a true character. Pretty much his whole job is to roar out his orders, roar out his pain, and roar out his rage at the gods, Jor-El, and Superman while looking angry enough to be in the mood to wipe out the entire human race.

Kevin Costner does an admirable job working against the script to make Jonathan Kent the patient, decent, honorable man and father Clark needs to set him on the path to becoming Superman. As written, this Jonathan is the most twisted, conflicted, and unintentionally corrupting mentor to a potential hero since Harry taught his code to Dexter.

"What was I supposed to do? Let them die?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

What the---?

How about, figure out a way to come to the rescue without letting people see you? You could have stayed under water and still saved the day. Swim under the bus next time. You'd get better leverage anyway. Then swim downstream and bob up later spluttering about how you got swept away because you can't swim.

See. Too much time to think.

Costner fills all Jonathan's lines counseling Clark on how he shouldn't be a superhero with self-doubt, marking Jonathan as a modest man who just doesn't feel he's up to the job fate's dumped on him of raising a son with powers and abilities far beyond those of his all too mortal self and placing him among the legions of real life parents who've found themselves responsible for children of extraordinary talent or difference.

Diane Lane does a lovely job of quietly balancing out Costner’s angst and doubt. I really like the way she evokes Amy Madigan in Field of Dreams. She doesn’t have Annie Kinsella’s temper but she’s got Annie’s hippie chick turned farmer’s wife combination of idealism and practicality. Her Martha never loses faith…in Clark. She’s had her son figured out from the start and knows where he’s headed and what’s in store. But she’s patient and willing to wait for her over-thinking husband and hot-headed kid to figure it all out for themselves, which she’s confident they will given time.

And Russell Crowe is terrific as the star of the movie within a movie, the one that begins on Krypton and tells the story of super-scientist Jor-El’s attempts to save the planet from ecological and political disaster and of his broken friendship with the super-idealistic Zod. That’s the movie Oliver Mannion says he would have liked to have seen. Unfortunately, that’s another story Snyder and Goyer lose track of before they get close to completing it. They take this one farther and deeper than the others, though, to the point of coming close to giving us its denouement. Then they throw away what should be the big moment and give us instead Superman doing that thing Superman would never do.

Speaking of Superman…

You’ve probably noticed I haven’t mentioned somebody’s name yet.

Henry Cavill’s.

I’ve been saving him.

Let me put it this way. If I could just show him rushing toward the camera pulling open his shirt to show that bright red S underneath, I’d do it and leave it at that. It would say it all.

Two problems with that. Cavill never gets that iconic moment in Man of Steel and even if he did his S isn’t bright red, it’s a dull metallic red, and it isn’t an S anyway. Where he comes from, it stands for…oh, never mind.

Cavill doesn’t get to be Superman much. He’s Clark Kent more often---and this movie’s Clark is a brooding cipher who has only one scene in which he shows any sign he’s the super man his mother believes he is---and when he puts on the supersuit he’s mostly just a red and blue blur flying through the cgi explosions and debris. But in those few short scenes when he’s allowed to act he makes a very good Superman, maybe even the second best Superman. It’ll take a sequel, a well-made sequel, to show if that’s the case.

Oliver Mannion's away for the weekend at a training workshop for his staff job at the day camp he'll be working at this summer. I sent him a text this morning asking him how things went last night. He sent back a full report:

Sunday, July 7, 2013. Welcome to all of you coming over from Crooks & Liars and thanks to B. for the link. Obviously, this was posted a couple weeks ago. June 27, to be precise.

Monday the Supreme Court decided to show us what a real assault on civil rights and the Constitution looks like.

“Times have changed,” declared John Roberts as he and his fellow Right Wing justices gutted the Voting Rights Act. Then apparently he muttered under his breath, “And I’m here to change them back.”

But yesterday was a good day for civil rights and equality as the forces of joy won two when the Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and punted Proposition 8 back to the California court that’s already struck it down.

Here in New York, where we already have marriage equality, there was still much rejoicing. Here’s a nice article on local reaction by Jeremiah Horrigan of the Times Herald-Record, focusing on the village of New Paltz which achieved a brief moment of national fame ten years ago when the mayor decided he could marry any couples who asked him. Some did and he did and for a short time this part of upstate New York was way ahead of the national curve. Then it got pointed out that what the mayor was doing was breaking the law and that was that until two years ago when the New York State legislature did what it so rarely likes to do, the right thing.

For the record, I wasn’t always an advocate of marriage equality. I didn’t oppose it. I just didn’t see the point. Neither did my gay friends. I was Catholic in my thinking about marriage and thought the point was to get God’s blessing on your spouse’s and your decision to have kids and raise a family together. Since I didn’t believe anybody really needed God’s blessing to do that, I didn’t think anybody who wanted to marry and have a family together (even if the family consisted only of two) needed the license.

All right, I needed to evolve.

And I did, a process that got underway quickly around twenty years ago, when I started listening to the arguments against gay marriage and I realized that the proponents of straights-only marriage had a very cramped and joyless opinion of marriage itself. They clearly saw it as a chore and a burden imposed upon us by God simply to save Himself the trouble of making more people out of dust. It was almost as if they believed when He had Adam and Eve driven from the Garden He said, Not only will you have to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow, you’re stuck with each other for the rest of your now miserably short lives and the same goes for your children and your children’s children, they will cleave to each other, male and female, and like it or lump it till death do them part, preferably increasing and mulitplying by the litterful until every last egg is used up or the woman wears out and drops.

The actual feelings of the couple getting married didn’t figure.

That’s when I began to see that marriage equality wasn't simply a question of fairness and legal rights. It was also about defending marriage itself, gay and straight, from the enemies of joy!

It was about what it means to be human and what we’re here for. And no way did I believe or do I believe that we’re here to live out the punishments inflicted on a couple of fictional characters in an ancient fairy tale starring a vain and malicious sky demon who gets miffed when his favorite creatures don’t behave like obedient pets.

From there I realized that was being called the Culture Wars was an ongoing battle between the forces of joy and its enemies.

Look at any issue at stake in the Culture Wars and you’ll see it’s basically a debate over whether we’re here to be happy and make each other happy or here to make ourselves and each other miserable on the off-chance our misery will be compensated for in the afterlife.

Registration not required but suggested for regular readers of this blog.

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Democratic Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney represents the next district over from here. I wish he’d find a way to push the boundaries of his district west a few miles. Our Congressman, Republican Chris Gibson, is well-meaning and in a better time would be a good Rockefeller Republican. Occasionally he’ll cross the aisle and vote the right way, which is to say, in the interests of his district and not according to the dictates of his party. But he’s scared to death of a primary challenge from the right. At any rate, even though they could have gotten married here anytime in the past two years, Maloney and his longtime partner have been putting it off until their union would be recognized by the federal government. So I guess wedding bells will soon be ringing, to the joy of their children and their families and all of us who celebrate and seek to defend marriage from its crabbed and cramp-souled enemies.

Here’s a picture of Maloney being sworn in as a member of the United States House of Representative in January. His partner Randy Florke holds the bible. John Boehner holds himself together as best he can. And Maloney and Florke’s children and other members of their family stand by and look proud.

One of the reasons I got such a kick out of Smallville was the respect its writers and producers and cast showed for all the tellings of Superman’s story that came before, first and foremost the Christopher Reeve movies, but also Lois and Clark, the several animated series---they even managed affection for Superfriends---the TV series starring George Reeves, the Fleischer Brothers’ cartoons, and, of course, the comic books. And Smallville’s initial premise centered on the one good thing in the Superboy comics, that Clark and Lex Luthor were best friends when they were very young men and neither’s destiny was known or certain.

I wonder if anyone counted all the allusions, direct references, homages, in—jokes, and out and out steals the show included over the course of its ten seasons. But they all came together as the series built slowly but steadily towards its thrilling final moments and everything great about Superman that has carried through all his incarnations was summed up in the final show’s very final shot.

But the genius of this was that even while paying tribute to the other Superman stories, Smallville still managed to tell its own version. It stayed true to its story of how the orphan from the doomed planet of Krypton grew up to be Earth’s greatest superhero. Along the way it regularly broke with the canonical narrative and added its own touches, touches that not only diverged from the old, old story but changed it, sometimes drastically, and yet often for the better. The show did things and went places that, even if it all hasn’t been reflected in the comic books, have been happily woven into my own private Superman myth. Lex and Clark’s reestablished broken friendship. His balancing friendships with Chloe and Oliver Queen. Lois’s falling in love with Clark first, before she’s even aware there is a Superman in the making. Jonathan and Martha Kent being relatively young when he’s growing up.

That last one has been incorporated into Man of Steel. The movie’s version of Clark’s childhood and youth owes everything to Smallville. Well, except for the movie’s Jonathan ambivalently teaching Clark to be a sociopath.

I’m not sure how many other references to previous Superman stories director Zack Snyder and his screenwriter David Goyer worked into Man of Steel. However many, most of them probably flew by me, along with the jokes and many important plot details.

Things fly by all movie long. The air is almost always full of stuff. Rocket ships, bullets and missiles, pieces of exploding planets, debris from crumbling buildings, cars tossed around by explosions, tornado-blown trees and cows on their way to Oz, falling aircraft, strange winged beasts over Krypton, angry villains, Lois Lane, and the occasional red and blue blur.

It’s often difficult to pick out specific images and lines of dialog in all the noise and confusion. But there is one scene where the air is filled only with snowflakes outside a window and things calm down long enough for us to truly take in what’s going on, and what’s going on is a dual-reference to Smallville and Superman II.

Clark has been doing his David Bruce Banner from the old Incredible Hulk TV show act, drifting around the country, settling but not settling in one out of the way place after another, taking odd jobs, reluctantly performing random acts of kindness and good deeds and then, after being forced to reveal his superpowers, moving on, and at the moment he’s working in a diner, with no apparent duties but to wear an apron and exchange smiles with a winsome waitress, when in struts a smirking bully of a truck driver looking to push around the other customers and harass the winsome waitress.

Ever the gentleman, Clark steps up to tell the truck driver to knock it off. The fortysomething trucker, who, unlike his big and burly progenitor in Superman II, is short and wiry, doesn’t back down. In fact, he dumps his beer over Clark’s head. Apparently, he’s used to intimidating six foot four inch, two-hundred and twenty pound twenty year olds. But instead of finding himself picked up and thrown out the door or through it, he gets to snigger as Clark stands there and does nothing for a moment and then takes off his apron and walks away, quitting on the spot rather than…rather than what? Pick up the bully and throw him out the door? Why doesn’t he do that?

I guess we’re meant to think he’s choosing not to kill the guy, as if, A. that’s his only option other than backing down himself and B. he hasn’t learned how to pull his punches yet, something you’d think Ma and Pa Kent would have taught him while he was still in his crib.

Maybe he’s worried he can’t deal with the bully without revealing his superpowers. Why he would think anybody watching a six-foot four-inch, two hundred and twenty pound twentysomething giving the bum’s rush to a middle-aged bully a head shorter than him, would assume he must have superpowers beats me. He doesn’t have to lift the trucker over his head, just grab him by the collar and hustle him out the door, maybe giving him a kick in the pants as he says goodnight and good riddance.

Whatever his reasons, he walks away. But the next thing we know, he’s taken petty revenge on the trucker in a way stolen outright from the very first episode of Smallville, where it wasn’t petty, just maybe a little juvenile, but excusably so. In that Smallville episode Clark is fourteen years old, a freshman in high school, and he’s getting a little of his own back against a gang of bullies, which he couldn’t do directly and out in the open without risking killing one or all of them because he hasn’t learned to pull his punches yet because he doesn’t have control of his powers yet, they’re still showing up and increasing in ways that take him totally by surprise. That’s important to the central premise of the first two or three seasons.

As for the Superman II reference: In that scene, Clark doesn’t back down. He gets beat up. He doesn’t have his superpowers anymore. He’s left them back at the Fortress of Solitude, he thinks forever. It’s not that he might not be able to pull his punches. It’s that his punches don’t pack the wallop they used to and the big, burly trucker is stronger than the now ordinarily human Clark Kent. This is a heart-wrenching moment for us because it dramatizes what we already know. Clark has made a terrible mistake in giving up his powers.

There is nothing heart-wrenching or recognizably and forgivably human in the scene in Man of Steel. And there are no resonances with those scenes from Smallville and Superman II. The references are there, they’re explicit, they’re well-meant, I think, and they’re inapt and inept. They don’t have either the emotional payoff or the storytelling logic of their originals and they don’t have anything to add thematically or narratively to this movie. They don’t connect this Superman with either Tom Welling’s Clark Kent or Christopher Reeve’s Superman. They don’t tell us anything about this Superman or this Clark Kent except that Snyder and Goyer aren’t ready for him to be ready to be Superman yet. They’re just in there to be in there and fill up narrative space. Which is generally the problem with the whole script.

Just about every scene is just in there to be in there. There’s no narrative logic only necessities of plot. We don’t learn anything about the characters because for the most part they aren’t characters, they’re just carriers of the plot at the given moment when they’re on screen. Snyder and Goyer aren’t using an action-adventure template to tell us a Superman or a Clark Kent story. They’re using the Superman myth as the template for a fairly routine action-adventure movie.

One more thing.

When in the coda of Superman II, Clark, his powers restored, returns to the diner to make a monkey of the trucker, it’s a very satisfying moment for two reasons. It’s great to see Superman being Superman in the kind of small, modest way that goes right along with his grander and more spectacular feats of heroism. He’s teaching the bully a lesson and showing the people he’s been bullying he can be stood up to. That’s what Superman does. He teaches and inspires. But also it’s fun to see him being a little petty. He’s doing this for his own satisfaction too. And we’re ok with it because by this time this Superman is Superman and he’s earned the right to be a little, well, human.

Don’t know why the clip doesn’t include the very important wrap up when Clark apologizes for the mess, pays for the damage, and explains to the dumbfounded owner, “I’ve been working out.”

And then there’s this, the final scene from the final episode of Smallville. If it doesn’t choke you up, you’re not really a Superman fan:

We're not a church, people. We're a bunch of know-it-alls with jobs that let us spend too much unsupervised time at our computers. None of us is going to heaven or hell for what we think about the NSA mess, Edward Snowden, the surveillance state or just about anything else.

He’s six feet tall. Weighs three twenty-five. He likes cigars. Likes food. Likes a drink now and then. Or more than now and then. His father owned a saloon. He tended bar before he took his vows. For years, until it closed, he was a regular at Elaine’s, the upper East Side restaurant famous for feeding writers and artists and Woody Allen life and soul-sustaining Italian meals. He took up his duties as pastor at Holy Cross in the early 90s when its Times Square neighborhood was still strip joints and X-rated movie theaters and pinball arcades. His congregation has ever since been a mixed flock of “actors and stagehands from the nearby Broadway theaters…workers from the post office across 42nd Street….bus drivers and commuters from the Port Authority Bus Terminal…young Wall Street types from the new apartment buildings that tower over the old Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. And ..the worshipers of Times Square in the 21st century: the tourists.”

Legend has it, and the legend’s told by Mickey Rourke himself, that he talked Rourke out of murder and suicide one day when Rourke stopped in at Holy Cross on his way to kill the man he believed had raped his wife. Father Colapietro took the gun away from Rourke, had him leave the suicide note for St Jude, patron saint of hopeless causes.

The priest himself has a less dramatic memory of the incident. Modesty talking, probably.

It’s no wonder members of the parish call him the Saloon Priest, but the nickname reminds me of Graham Greene’s Whiskey Priest and Father Peter Colapietro is far, far from a lost soul.

The people at Holy Cross are going to feel lost without him, I expect.

After eighteen years as pastor, which is twelve years longer than pastors at Catholic churches are supposed to serve, Father Colapietro’s being transferred.

Hostess is betting on a sweet comeback for Twinkies when they return to shelves next month.

The company that went bankrupt after an acrimonious fight with its unionized workers last year is back up and running under new owners and a leaner structure. It says it plans to have Twinkies and other snack cakes back on shelves starting July 15.

Based on the outpouring of nostalgia sparked by its demise, Hostess is expecting a blockbuster return next month for Twinkies and other sugary treats, such as CupCakes and Donettes. The company says the cakes will taste the same but that the boxes will now bare the tag line "The Sweetest Comeback In The History Of Ever."

Superman (to suspicious military man doubting his loyalties): I grew up in Kansas, General. You can’t get more American than that.

Me (commenting from the cheap seats): Ahem? Supes?

Captain America’s from Brooklyn.

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Keith Boykin had similar thoughts but more and more insightful things to say on the subject:

But even as the new Man of Steel wisely acknowledges the changing racial composition of Metropolis, it sometimes dwells in a hagiographic retelling of Clark Kent's coming of age in an idyllic Midwestern farming community. "I grew up in Kansas," Superman [General Swanwick]. "You can’t get more American than that." But the Manhattan audience where I saw the film immediately snickered.

You can read the whole post, Race, Racism and the Man of Steel,at BET. I’m sure I don’t have to warn you about spoilers. I do have to warn you about autolaunching video ads.

At
Mom and Pop Mannion's for a visit. Left the house this morning, heading out to get
bagels and suddenly I felt myself hopefully expecting my friend and next
door neighbor Sandy to come rushing out to catch up with me and tag
along down to Union Street just as it used to go back when we were kids.
I was disappointed when I realized he wouldn't be joining me. Sandy
hasn't lived in that house for over 30 years.

Big question yet to be answered: Is Man of Steel the first installment in a Justice League series?

Second Question: Does anybody want it to be? To put it another way, do we want to see a Justice League led by this Superman?

Third question: Do we really care if they make a Justice League movie at all?

Oliver and Ken Mannion were on top of this a long time ago. On the whole, starting with Bruce Timm’s Batman: The Animated Series, the cartoons based on the DC Universe have been better than all the live-action movies, except for The Dark Knight, and some of the Marvel-based ones as well, with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm being the best of the best. They’re including the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies and Batman Begins in their judgment. As far as they’re concerned, there’s just about no point in trying to make a Justice League movie because the cartoon series has been there, done that, and done it very, very well, far better than any movie rushed into the theaters just to compete with The Avengers is likely to be.

Number of the anti-surveillance state absolutists in my circles of acquaintance---I'd call them the Greenwaldians except that Greenwald, the most prominent victim of Obama Derangement Syndrome on the left side of the bandwith, has made such a jackass of himself over the last five years that calling them that would be an unfair, unnecessary, and unmeant insult. But basically I 'm talking about people who accept that Greenwald has been way more often right than wrong on the issues of privacy and domestic spying and in his belief that the government is almost always up to no good in the so-called War on Terror.---start from the assumption that all the questions at issue in the debate over the NSA mess have been settled and settled in their favor and anyone who doesn't agree with them is stupid, a coward, or a moral monster, and probably all three.

Apparently they're under the impression that the best way to persuade others is to shame them, insult them,or infuriate them.

But mainly it's because I don't have the information I need to settle my questions and concerns.

We have a pretty good idea of what the NSA has been up to, gathering information on everybody they can, and how much information they're after---all of it. Which is probably far more than it needs and more than any of us want them to have even those of us who aren't that worried about what they might be doing with it. But it doesn't settle it for me because it matters what 's being done with it and at this point that has to be guessed at.

Supposed.

Surmised.

Conjectured.

Extrapolated.

Imagined.

Neither of the two main sides--- which I think of as the dystopian absolutists and the shoulder-shrugging if not quite utopians then borderline Panglossians---or the OMFG we're just one government employee-read email from living in a full-blown police state crowd and the Hey, the Feds gotta do what the Feds gotta do to go after the bad guys but relax, we can trust them, or trust the President, or trust the FISA court, or trust Congress, trust somebody at any rate to see they don't cross any lines or go too far over them, and besides the data's out there and by its very nature it's being collected, nothing we can do about that anymore so we might as well not worry about it and go update our Facebook statuses contingent---neither side can tell me anything more about what's actually happening beyond what they're guessing, supposing, surmising, conjecturing, extrapolating, imagining.

The truth is out there but it hasn't arrived yet, and so arguments aren't based so much on facts as they are upon competing fictions. One side's nightmares versus the other's rosy daydreams.

The absolutists don't seem to realize that’s what they’re doing, describing their nightmares and then demanding I accept those nightmares as being as prophetic as the Pharaoh's dream. The shoulder shruggers, for the most part, Josh Marshall excepted, don't seem aware they're pushing their hopeful opinions as fact and take it for granted that worrywart doubters like me will come around when we calm down or when all the facts come out, which is something else they take for granted, that the facts will come out.

As you can tell, I'm not finding either side very persuasive.

When I put my concerns and confusions on Twitter, looking for some answers or at least advice and guidance on where and how to look for answers, a friend accused me of copping out by taking a pox on both your houses stand or, rather, non-stand.

The same friend suggested that I don't need the kind of answers I'm searching for to decide where I should come down on the overall question. He said all I needed to do was look at the bloggers, journalists, and pundits I read regularly, see who's making which argument, and then go with those people whose judgments and opinions events have most often proven to have been right.

There are problems with that, starting with it immediately forcing me to choose sides between Josh Marshall and Glenn Greenwald, and in that matchup guess who wins or, more to the point, who loses because he's been such a jackass. But even putting aside personal feelings, however much you admire Glenn---and I do, although nowhere near as much as I used to---Talking Points Memo is far and away the greater accomplishment and gift to the liberal blogosphere than all of Glenn's prodigious blogging and op-ed writing.

And Josh, through TPM, is right more often and on more subjects, because he employs lots of people whose job is to get things right in his name on his dime. Glenn is a one-man band and his focus is mainly on civil liberties. His job isn’t to get things right. He starts from the premise he is right. His job is to convince his readers that he’s right, a job that’s gotten a little easier since he’s become such a jackass about it. He’s alienated so many people that most of the readers he has now don’t read him to be convinced---they’re already convinced---they read him the way believers go to church to hear a popular preacher’s sermons.

I feel comfortable making sweeping and dismissive generalizations like that. It’s a trick I learned from Glenn himself.

Makes me kind of a jackass myself, I guess.

But being right often doesn't automatically make you right this time. And jackasses aren't automatically wrong.

Here's the thing though.

I've never kept score in this way. If I did, I suspect that few if any of even my favorites would score over 40 percent, not even digby. But beyond that, I don't read the writers I admire and trust because I think they 're right. That's a good way to wind up reading only people you already agree with because you know they're going to tell you what you already think is right.

I read people whose writing is clear and honest and because of that they can make it clear what they honestly think and that helps me figure out what I think and if I’m right to think it or if I have to go back and re-think it.

But here’s the next problem. Most of the political writers and bloggers and journalists and pundits I read regularly online are liberals and Democrats. Most of those who aren’t are out and out leftists. (And, by the way, I wish more of the leftists would identify themselves as such, instead of hiding behind the word “progressive.” It’s a proud tradition. Own it.) And over here on the west coast of Blogtopia (hat tip as always to Skippy), doom and gloom is our métier. We’re not happy unless we’re predicting disaster for our own side. And when we’re in this mode is we’re usually, well, not necessarily wrong but not as right as we think we are or not right in the way we expected to be or not right for the right reasons.

I tried making this point back in March. I think all I did was ride my hobby-horse into the ground. But…

Although we pride ourselves on being part of the reality-based community---after all, facts have a liberal bias and the scientists on our side---we don’t tend to argue online like scientists. Or like lawyers. Or like scholars or experts of any kind. Even those of us who are scientists, lawyers, scholars, and experts. We argue like human beings, smart, thoughtful, well-educated human beings with snappy prose styles, but still human beings, which means mostly we don’t argue, we throw out an opinion and then set out to defend it, with our egos and vanity always on the front line.

What defines us as reality-based is that when facts come along that prove an opinion wrong we change that opinion.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

The trouble I’m having is that neither side has the facts, not enough of the salient facts, to help me form an opinion because the government is sitting on those facts, the most salient of which is whether the “surveillance state” is protecting us from terrorists and doing it in a way that can’t be done in other, less intrusive and secretive ways.

Please don’t quote Franklin on liberty and security. For one thing, most people get the quote wrong. For another, it’s possible it’s not his. For a third, even if it is Franklin’s, quoting it is about as profound as quoting A penny saved is a penny earned in a discussion of fiscal policy.

And for a fourth, we’re not talking about a “little” security.

We’re talking about how much danger we are in of being blown up on the streets.

But we can’t talk about that knowledgably or reasonably because we don’t know. The President won’t tell us and he’s working extra hard to make sure nobody else will tell us either.

The little he will tell us has not been either reassuring or persuasive.

The director of the NSA says at least fifty terrorist threats have been thwarted, but his few examples don’t sound all that threatening or even like real threats. The foiled “plot” to bomb the Stock Exchange sounds like another clown show of the kind the FBI has hadn’t had much trouble shutting those down in the good old-fashioned way of sending agents under cover, employing paid informants, relying on snitches and concerned citizens to drop a dime, or just waiting around for the clowns to screw up. You've all seen this one, right?

I’m willing to sacrifice a “little” security to save hundreds of lives.

If that’s what happened.

I don’t know. And I’m mad that I don’t know and am not being allowed to know.

More than I’m worried that the government might be violating the Fourth Amendment, I’m angry that it’s abrogating the deal we have with our government, which is that we get the main say in how we are governed.

We can’t have a say if we don’t know what’s being done in our name and on our behalf.

I don’t like to whine and moan about my personal troubles here. I do it. But I don’t like to. As many of you know and a lot of you have probably guessed, I’ve been something of a physical wreck the last few months. Chronic hip and back pain that grew worse and worse to the point that I was, first, using a cane to get around New York City, then, barely able to walk across the room. All kinds of small, daily tasks were becoming experiments in pain management. Just standing in front of the bathroom mirror to shave turned into a trial.

Discouraging.

It was also getting a little scary.

Self-diagnosis never leads to optimism.

Mainly, though, it’s been frustrating.

All my life I've been a walker. I was up and on my feet and headed out the door at 10 months. I do my best thinking on the hoof and a great many of my posts here ---including, until this past trip, virtually all of them from Cape Cod---have been reports on where I've gone and what I've seen, done, and thought while out for a walk. And I haven't been able to take a good long walk or even a short one in a long, long while.

I also haven't been up to tackling any home repair projects that can't be completed in a few minutes or while sitting down. Drove me mad that the work we broke the bank to pay the plumbers to do I could have done myself. I just wasn't confident that I could finish the job once I started it. The climbing up on the roof part was definitely out.

And it’s awfully hard to sit comfortably at the computer long enough to bang out a whole blog post. Productivity and quality have declined accordingly.

I've also either been loopy from lack of sleep and various painkillers or groggy from too much sleep brought on by the various painkillers. So it's been a little hard to focus or maintain coherence.

(This is also my excuse for my excessive and irritible and irritating Twittering of late. I need to vent somehow.)

But after X-rays, blood tests, an MRI, a trip to the orthopedist I now know what the problem is.

I’m not exactly sure what it is but it’s nice to be able to tell people.

Friend: Lance! You look terrible! What’s wrong with you?

Me: Spondylolithesis.

Friend: Oh, well, if that’s all…

Ok, this is how I understand it.

There’s a rebellious vertebrae in my lower back that’s out of place and pinching the nerves to my hips and legs. I asked the doctor how that happens and he said, basically, it just does. It could be the result of a long ago injury. Mom Mannion’s convinced it happened when I fell off my bike when I was nine. It might have happened that night back in college when I ran into a fence and went somersaulting through the air, landing ten feet beyond the now seriously bent fence, flat on my back, with a quick-thinking friend sitting on my chest so I wouldn’t move before the ambulance arrived and hurt my spinal cord. It could have happened fairly recently when I sneezed.

Or I could have been born with it.

“It could take that long to show up?” I asked.

It not only could, he said, but it’s often the passage of time that causes it to show up. When you get older your back muscles tighten, your abs weaken, you slow up and stop doing some of the things you used to do just to burn off the excess energy of youth. You get lazy.

I did, anyway.

The first symptom was my aching back. A couple years ago when I began to feel it, I shrugged it off, figuring I’d just strained it or slept wrong or the weather was getting to it or it was one of the normal aches and pains that come with getting old. What I did about it was all wrong. The best thing you can do for a “spondy” is keep moving. The worst is what it makes you most want to do, lie down and rest. I lay down to rest. I put off chores and errands and other ordinary tasks and endeavors that light as they were were still exercise, thinking, I’ll get to it when I feel a little better. But putting things off became a bad habit.

At the same time, Ken and Oliver Mannion were taking over the snow shoveling, lawn mowing, vacuuming, and hauling the laundry up and down the basement stairs. And of course I was proud of them for pitching in but I was also relieved. Decreased the likelihood I was going to be found some day keeled over in a pile of snow out front or in a patch of dandelions out back.

The doctor prescribed some medicine that kicked in so fast I thought I had to be imagining it. But the effect hasn't worn off even though the medicine has run its prescribed course. I can't say it's fixed me up completely but it has relieved a good deal of the pain, enough that I've been feeling positively frisky, comparatively, and I've been beetling about like a very spry eighty-five tear old. I even mowed part of the lawn Monday. A small part. But still.

This made Young Ken mad, by the way. Not only was I risking hurting myself, he felt, I was doing his job.

Ken's main employment since school let out has been acting as my legman and he's taking the responsibility seriously. In fact, he's disappointed when he asks and I don't have a chore for him to do or an errand to run. He might never forgive me if I get any better.

If I will get any better and how much better if I do are the questions, of course. I have a follow up scheduled at the orthopedist's and we'll see. There are two ways this might go.

More medication along with some physical therapy or surgery.

The doctor said that if I responded to the medication the first option's the more likely. That ends today's medical report.

Anyway, I’m telling you this for three reasons, one of which is not to solicit pity, although if you want to give it, I’ll gladly take it. I can soak up pity like nobody’s business. Ask the blonde.

The first is that I’m really telling you this as an apology for the slow pace of the blogging around here since January.

I expect that to change.

I've had a hard time typing. That doesn't mean I haven't been writing. I can scribble in my notebooks from almost any position. I've filled three of them since December and I intend to type up and post here on the blog as many entries as I can over the summer. Actually, I've already started. You've probably noticed that posts have been appearing with dates at the top days, weeks, and even months before the date they posted. Yesterday's post and its soon to post follow up obviously should have run last week. I started this post a week ago Wednesday, the day after I saw the orthopedist. I'll be continuing mining the notebooks like this, in addition to posting new stuff, partly for my own satisfaction, partly to have it all in the archives to impress the students in the class Steve Kuusisto and I are teaching in the fall. But I 'm also doing it because I hope you 'll enjoy them. Many are still timely and a few are actually good.

That’s the first reason for this post. The second reason is to remark again on how lucky I am. I don’t know what people who don’t have good health insurance do when they’re in my boat. Trips to the doctor, blood tests, X-rays, MRIs, medicine---that gets very expensive very fast.

Well, I do know what they do.

Try to tough it out as long as they can.

Then, if they have jobs that don’t let them sit down in comfortable chairs for a good part of the day, they quit working and apply for disability.

The third reason is to give myself an excuse to post this cartoon. Making my rounds from doctors’ offices to X-ray theaters to MRI suites to blood labs and back around again made me feel like Popeye here, except, of course, Popeye’s faking it to get Olive Oyl’s attention and I’ve been pretending not to be as bad off as I’ve been so no one would worry too much.

Oliver Mannion has developed Pop Mannion’s disconcerting talent for appearing completely oblivious to the fact you’re talking to him and then when you complain he’s not listening to a word you’re saying being able to repeat back to you what you said word for word.

I know I should be angry and afraid I'm living in "the" surveillance state and I guess I would be...if I knew what it meant.

People on both sides use the term as if it has a specific, universally ageed upon meaning, but as far as I can tell it's really being used as shorthand for "For the sake of keeping the argument simple, let's pretend there's no difference between my dystopian/utopian vision of what the NSA’s up to and your utopian/dystopian view."

But since neither side really knows what’s going on---because the government won’t tell us, which is central to the problem and the main cause for concern---and because the people on both sides are human, the definitions are individual and charged with the feelings and opinions of the individual using it to make their case.

In other words “the surveillance state” means only what the person using it thinks it means, or feels it means, or wants it to mean, but the user is under no obligation to tell us what that is.

The dystopians I get, though. I think. They're using it as a technocratic synonym for Big Brother is watching and they mean that 1984 isn't to be taken as mere fiction.

They're still haunted by their high school reading of Orwell's novel which they remember not as a satire on what was happening in contemporary Great Britain circa 1948 (48, 84? Get it? ) but as political theory.

It's a lefty version of The Road to Serfdom.

So I’m left to come up with my own definition. I’m not doing a good job of it, but here’s what I’ve got so far.

I always took the idea that Big Brother is watching not the hallmark of a surveillance state but as a primary function of a police state.

Surveillance---spying---is how a repressive government gathers not just information but information it can use against its citizens, to bully them into silence and conformity and destroy them if they don't shut up and conform.

But Big Brother isn't watching in the old Orwellian way.

In an old-fashioned police state---surveillance state---the government had to employ agents to surreptitiously gather information people thought they were keeping private. Now the government just has to look at what people are making public themselves.

In the good old days we trusted the government not to have a network of spies and informants reporting on our private comings and goings, our personal associations, connections, and relationships, the private thoughts and feelings we took for granted we were only sharing with friends.

These days, via the internet, social media, and our addiction to yakking in public on cell phones that connect us with satellites whether we know it, need it, or want it or not, we blab our private business to the whole world, then trust the government to pretend we didn't do it.

Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Jonathan and Martha Kent in Man of Steel.

You can’t cast Kevin Costner in your movie, put him on a farm, and not expect your audiences to think of Field of Dreams.

You can’t put him next to a box of Green Giant frozen niblets without that happening.

First time he walks by a cornfield every other adult in the theater’s hearing in their heads “If you build it, he will come.”

The question is how aware was Zack Snyder that that's the case? I can’t tell from Man of Steel or Snyder's filmography if he knows or cares anything about movies that aren’t based on comic books, don’t depend on lots of cgi, and don’t feature interminable scenes of well-built men brutally hacking and beating each other to bloody pieces and pulps.

So maybe he didn’t intend any allusions and this is all my own imagination.

But his designers must have seen it. And Costner, of course. And I suspect Diane Lane would have been aware of it too. So maybe it was deliberate that Costner and Lane seem to be playing the Kents as older, slightly more worn down versions of Ray and Annie Kinsella, the couple Costner and Amy Madigan played in Field of Dreams.

The outfit Lane’s Martha is wearing in the picture up top---the cutoffs, gingham blouse, and Keds---reminds me of the outfits Madigan’s Annie favored. In fact, I’m not sure, but I think I remember Madigan wearing something almost exactly like it in at least one scene.

What does this mean, if the allusion’s intentional?

That Superman was raised by obsessive baseball fans?

Well, Clark does wear a Kansas City Royals baseball shirt at one point.

What I think it means is this:

Think of James Earl Jones’ horror-stricken exclamation when he realizes what he’s dealing with when Ray turns up in Boston to take his character, the novelist Terence Mann, back to Iowa with him.

“Oh my God! You’re from the Sixties!”

Jonathan and Martha Kent are from the Sixties!

Superman was raised by a couple of ex-hippies!

Explains a lot about Superman, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t explain much about him as a character in Man of Steel where he barely has any character. The adult Clark Kent and his alter-ego are a couple of ciphers in Man of Steel. This isn’t Henry Cavill’s fault. Clearly a lot is going on subtextually for him and in his last couple of scenes this subtext starts to become text. He’s just not given enough to say or do with other characters that goes beyond serving the mechanics of the plot for us to get to know him. Knowing that Clark is trying to live up to ideals imparted by his lefty parents would add some character to his character.

Some of you may have received email from "me" that wasn't from me. The subject heading is Re: Lance Mannion. Dont open it! If you do, don't click on the link inside! My email account was hacked. I'm sorry about that. It's under control now.

By the way, if you're ever wondering about any messages from me. I'm usually more creative in my subject headings, I don't send blind links, and I never end a note by giving people my "best regards", although all of you really do have my best regards.

The “real” Lois wouldn’t need the villains to make a stupid, illogical, and entirely unnecessary decision that amounts to their saying to each other, “Hey, let’s drag along this character we’ve got zero interest in just so she’ll be in a position to fuck up our evil plans when the time comes.”

Director Zack Snyder has apparently only just spotted the Jesus parallels in the Superman myth. I’d have thought he’d have had this all figured out by the time he was done filming Watchmen. At any rate, he’s very excited by it, which is fine and it’s nice of him to want to share. But…

While a few eight year olds might not have had this dawn on them yet, to most everybody else in America this is very old news and besides, Superman was created by a couple of teenage science fiction and action-adventure fans who also happened to be secular Jews, he is popular all around the world and his devoted fans include millions and millions of people who aren’t Christian, and just because his story has parallels to Christ’s that doesn’t make him Jesus any more than other avatars of the myth---Hercules, David, King Arthur, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter---are Jesus.

He’s not Aslan, for you know whose sake!

Also, the Kents are Kansans. It’s likely they’re Christians but probably not Catholics.

________________________

Pastors of all denominations are delighted with all the Jesus imagery. It’s given them a month’s worth of sermons and Sunday School lessons that the kids might actually pay attention to.

Right Wing pundits, critics, and bloggers are thrilled too. Of course. It gives them permission to like the movie. Conservatives these days can’t enjoy anything unless it validates their politics in some way. I’ve said this before, but I swear there’s such a thing as a conservative milk shake. But Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog has found one Town Hall blogger taking it a step further, whining that the reason Man of Steel hasn't gotten universally glowing reviews is liberal critics hate Jesus.

What catches my attention in SteveM's piece and its quotes is the way the pro-christian interpretation desperately looks for heroic father figures and stasis, rather than accepting the primacy of Superman (or even Jesus) in his own story. They draw the viewer's attention to the (supposedly) much maligned father-as-leader. I thought the most interesting thing was the transmutation of the phrase "speak truth to power" into the extremely significant "speak truth to those who need to hear it." This is the role Christian dads are assigned: lecturer to the indifferent masses, Cassandras and naysayers and complainers who are ignored by those (women, children, minorities, pagans) who should be [taking] dictation rather than having their own thoughts.

I think that’s a very good point. But there’s probably something else at work too, tied up in the cheering for the two strong father-figures in Man of Steel.

It’s a lot easier for fanboys of a certain age to identify with Kevin Costner than with Henry Cavill.

________________________

Updated in a single bound, Wednesday, June 19: In comments on the link to this post I put up on Facebook, friend, professor, and pizza and wing connoiseur Chris Galdieri makes the case that Superman's myth is more like Moses' than Jesus'. Chris sees the rocket from Krypton as the basket sent down the river to be found in the bullrushes. I get that. The difference is that Moses was a slave raised by royalty to be a prince. Superman, like Jesus, is essentially a prince raised by commoners. But there's no
reason both myths can't be at work. And there's a tradition that has
Jesus as the New Moses. That's how the Slaughter of the Innocents got in
there. But Superman has more in common with other "chosen one" myths
that then have more in common with Jesus than with Moses. Hercules, David,
King Arthur, Luke Skywalker, all "gods" and sons of "gods" raised in
humble circumstances by humans. Whatever, all of it's been imposed
since Action Comics 1. It's unlikely Siegel and Shuster were thinking of
either Jesus or Moses when they came up with Superman. Their models
were Flash Gordon, Doc Savage, and John Carter of Mars. The point is
Zack Snyder goes way overboard with the Jesus imagery [Editor's note: pun intended, based on the photo above.] and the
conservatives who're making so much of it clearly seem to think that
liberals never noticed the parallels before this movie instead of its
being something we "got" when we were like 12 and thought profound for
all of a day.